Samsung Series 7 Chronos laptop spotted in Best Buy for $1,200

Samsung first teased us with this all metal body, ridiculously thin yet powerful Series 7 Chronos at CES 2013 – but without revealing a price or release date. An Engadget reader spotted one of these beauties at a U.S. Best Buy with a price tag of $1,200 (on sale from $1,300).

This machine is stacked with technical wizardry for multimedia content creation and gaming. It has a 2.4GHz Intel Core i7 3635QM processor, dedicated graphics in the form of the AMD Radeon HD 8770M GPU, 8GB RAM for the system, 1TB hard drive, and a 1920 x 1080 resolution 15.6-inch touchscreen. Back when this laptop was first announced, the press release mentioned that you can increase the RAM to 16GB and that the graphics RAM would be 2GB rather than 1GB. However, that’s not the configuration that is available at Best Buy now. You may have to order direct from Samsung to further customize this machine.

This Windows 8 laptop is also packed with plenty of ports to make it easy to plug in all your peripherals. It has a total of four USB ports (two USB 3, and two USB 2), an HDMI-out to hook up to an HDTV, a VGA-out for plugging into a monitor or projector, and a combined audio/mic jack where you can plug in your gaming headset.

At 5.18 pounds and 0.82 inches thick, this powerhouse is technically a thin-and-light multimedia computer and not an Ultrabook. After getting some hands-on time with the Chronos at CES this year, we found the laptop to feel light in-hand when compared to current competitors with similar hardware. In fact, the Chronos is actually lighter and thinner than the 15-inch MacBook Pro, which starts at $1,800.

With the Series 7 Chronos’ metal body design and sheer computing power, we wonder why anyone would opt for the slightly more expensive and less powerful Chromebook Pixel from Google?

[UPDATE 5:42PM 2/26/2013: The GPU has be updated from AMD Radeon HD 8870M GPU to AMD Radeon HD 8770M GPU, based on the configuration reader @manishdev purchased from his local Best Buy.]